Margaret Sanger

Woman and the New Race Margaret Sanger

Originally published in 1920 (that being the edition I read), Sanger's radical exhortation in favor of contraception is a passionate polemic. She presents birth control as a solution to all the world's problems and she predicts its ultimate, inexorable triumph. It struck me to see, even this early in her career, her arguments that the "feeble minded" and immigrant poor in particular have too many children, preventing the development of "a greater race." (This is presumably the human race; or maybe a new "race" of Americans; but the eugenic overtone is unmistakable.) Such a rationale ends up interlaced with her feminism, pacifism, pragmatism, and so on. Voluntary motherhood is for Sanger the key to women's emancipation, to the point that she dismisses women's suffrage and labor movements as mere "palliatives." She musters all kinds of experts, statistics, and examples to make her case; yet claims straight-faced that greater scarcity of human beings will lead to greater respect for human life, thus making wars untenable. Quite the document of its time.